May 26, 2026 • 18 mins
In Part 2 of The Wanderer’s Curse, we follow Odysseus from Calypso’s island through the Underworld and into his violent return to Ithaca. After twenty years of war and wandering, Odysseus is no longer the man who sailed to Troy. Through encounters with Achilles, Agamemnon, and the dead, Homer forces us to confront the true cost of war, survivor’s guilt, grief, and homecoming.When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, he does not find peace waiting for him. He finds another battlefield. This episode explores how The Odyssey becomes not just a story of adventure, but a story about the psychological burden of surviving war.
Explore more Greek myth and epic retellings:
The Homeric Chronicles, an adult fantasy series inspired by Greek mythology and the Trojan War.
Homeric Chronicles Series
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Explore more Greek myth and epic retellings:
The Homeric Chronicles, an adult fantasy series inspired by Greek mythology and the Trojan War.
Homeric Chronicles Series
WikiHow Expert Contributor
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:22):
Welcome back, murmered Ons to another episode of Greek Mythology
Retold Podcasts. I hope this episode finds you and yours
having a most excellent day. If this is your first
time joining us, welcome to our world where we love
Greek myths and all Trojan War related stories. I am
Janelle Ryhannon, the writer and host of this podcast and
(00:44):
author of the Homeric Chronicles and Epic Fantasy centered on
the Trojan War and the Odyssan and post Odissian era.
This is part two of the second episode in the
Odysseus series, where we will explore a king who is
struggling to return to that one place he has longed
to be for years. Home. The next leg of Odysseus's
(01:08):
journey takes him to the underworld, where he has a
breakthrough moment because it is the first place that he
can't fight, raid, seduce, deceive, command, or muscle his way
through the problem. He has to stand before the dead
and listen. The underworld experience takes on a new perspective
if we are reading him as a veteran struggling with
(01:31):
war and guilt, and his return in the underworld, Odysseus
is forced to look directly at the cost of everything
that he has survived. His mother, Antiklia, shows him that
his absence has wounded the home he is trying to reach.
She died grieving for him, and when he tries to
embrace her, she slips through his arms like a ghost.
(01:54):
This is what he has to look forward to, seeing
what his absence has done and knowing that he can't
undo it. Then Agamemnon gives him the nightmare version of homecoming.
Agamemnon survived Troy, crossed the sea, reached his home, only
to be murdered by Kladeymnestra and Asus. So the underworld
(02:15):
message isn't telling Odysseus go home. It plants the idea
that home itself might be dangerous. The man who survives
war may not be welcomed by the world that he
left behind. And then Achilles breaks the heroic code completely.
Odysseus tries to comfort him by saying he rules among
(02:36):
the dead, but Achilles rejects that consolation. He says that
he would rather be a poor farm hand alive than
lord over all these shadowy dead. This is Achilles, the
greatest warrior of the age, the man who chose glory
over long life, saying from beyond the grave that glory
(02:57):
was not enough. That had to shake go Odysseus up.
Everything these men were taught about war around the campfires
and hearts as they were growing up. Honor, fame, spoils
song is called into question by the dead themselves. Achilles
doesn't even ask about his own glory. He asks about
(03:18):
his son Neoptolemus. He longs for his father, Pelias. Achilles
says that he is of no use to those he
loves because he can't help them now that he is dead.
So the underworld forces Odysseus to confront the truth that
war doesn't end when the fighting stops. It follows men
into their homes, into their families, into their memories, and
(03:42):
even into the afterlife. By the time Odysseus leaves the underworld,
he has not simply received prophecy. He has been forced
to look death, regret, failed homecoming, and broken glory in
the face. By the time Odysseus reaches calyps he is
no longer a man just delayed on his way home.
(04:04):
He is the sole survivor. Every ship is gone, every
man who followed him from Troy is dead. This is
where the survivor guilt becomes impossible to ignore. He would
have years to replay every decision, the Scones, the cyclops Aolis,
bag of winds, the Lystragonians, Circe, the cattle of Helios.
(04:27):
He would be thinking, where did I fail? What should
I have done differently? Could I have saved them? That
kind of mental return to the moment of loss is
part of the burden Doctor David Seafood describes when he
asks us to imagine quote the guilt, sense of failed
responsibility and helplessness end quote of being unable to prevent
(04:51):
injury or death. Odysseus is not only grieving his men.
He is carrying the unbearable fact that he lived and
they did not. That is why Calypso is not merely
another circe. Circe was the danger of comfort becoming forgetfulness.
Calypso is the danger of captivity becoming despair. By the
(05:12):
time Odysseus reaches Ogigia, he has lost every external marker
of the man that he once was. He has no ships,
he has no army, no command, no spoils, no comrades,
and no battlefield. Identity. He is not home, so he
can't fully be a king or husband or father. But
(05:33):
he's no longer at war either, so he can't be
the commander, the raider, the strategist, the hero who mattered
at Troy. He exists in between identities, trapped on an
island with a goddess who desires him but can't restore
him to himself, and the reversal is brutal. For Odysseus.
(05:54):
In the Iliad, he is the man in control. He
is the one who goes on the night raids. He
takes prisoners, interrogates enemies, kills sleeping men, and returns to
camp with blood on his hands and honor attached to
his name. But on Calypso's island, he is now the captive.
He is the one without agency. He is the one
(06:17):
whose body is wanted while his will is ignored. He
has lost command, not only of his men because they're dead,
but also he's lost command of himself. This is why
the Odysseus we see with Calypso is immobilized by despair.
The Odysseus of Troy might have thrown himself into the
(06:38):
sea and dared the gods to stop him. But this
Odysseus has been worn down by twenty years of war
and wandering and grief, and he has suffered substantial loss.
He is no longer a man of action and honor.
So if the Cyclops episode shows Odysseus reaching back toward
the identity that war gave him, Circe shows him numbing
(07:01):
himself through comfort and suspended time, Calypso shows what happens
when that identity collapses. He is hidden from the world,
erased from his own story, and reduced to longing. He
needs release, and he can't achieve that release alone. The
(07:21):
gods have to intervene because Odysseus for once can't find
the strength to cunning his way off of the island.
By the time Odysseus returns to Ithaca, he is not
the same man who sailed to Troy twenty years earlier.
He has been through ten years of war, raids, ambushes, slaughter, command, loss,
(07:42):
and ten more years of wandering, temptations, grief, captivity, and
now finally survival. He has been the man who led
night raids with Diamedes, the man who sacked Troy, the
man who blended the Cyclops, and who lost ship after
ship and crew after crew until he remained by Calypso's island.
He has lost almost every external marker of power that
(08:06):
he once had. He has no army, no ships, no spoils,
and no comrades and no command. He is sole survivor.
He is alive, but he is stripped down to just
his memory, and before he ever reaches Ithaca, the underworld
has already poisoned the idea of homecoming. Agamemnon tells of
the nightmare version of Nostos. A man can survive Troy,
(08:30):
cross the sea, and reach his house and still be
murdered at his hearth. He tells Odysseus that no woman
is safe. Agamemnon's warning is bitter, even misogynistic, because he
has been betrayed, but his words find purchase. This teaches
Odysseus that homecoming can't be trusted. He can't simply walk
(08:51):
through the doors as a husband and a father and
king with his arms wide open. He has to test
the house, He has to watch, He has to hide himself.
So when Odysseus returns in disguise, that is not just
a strategy. It is the behavior of a man who
has learned that home might be dangerous, and instead of peace,
(09:11):
that he might find betrayal. That is what makes the
Ithaca section of his story so tragic. Odysseus has spent
the entire poem trying to get home, but when he
finally arrives, home doesn't offer peace. His house has become
occupied territory. The suitors have consumed his wealth and dishonored
his household, pressured his wife, threatened his son, and plotted
(09:35):
his son's murder. Odysseus can't return as Penelope's husband or
Telemachus's father just walk in and resume his roles. He
has to return as an infiltrator, the strategist, the killer,
the very skills that war has carved into him. These
are the skills that Ithaca now demands. He comes home
(09:55):
for peace, but his enemies have brought him war. Yeah,
I smuck and little Red rising. You know, you know
that is the brutal irony of Odysseus's homecoming. If he
had returned with twelve ships and hundreds of hardened veterans,
the suitors likely would have scattered because they aren't warriors.
They were too young to go to Troy. They were
the boys that war and their fathers left behind. But
(10:17):
Odysseus returns alone. All the power he should have brought
from Troy is gone. No army stands behind him, no
comrades surround him, no spoils announce his victory. He has
only his body, his mind, his son, a few loyal servants,
and the old war honed cunning that kept him alive.
So in order to reclaim the domestic world, he has
(10:41):
to reactivate the warrior's self. The man who has been
broken by war must become useful through war once again.
And this is where Telemachus becomes so important. Their union
is deeply moving, because Odysseus doesn't only regain a son,
Telemachus regains the father he new. Odysseus also brings Telemachus
(11:03):
into violence. Telemachus is no longer a child. He is
around twenty, bearded, publicly recognized, already trying to step into
adult male status, but he is untested in war. He
has been humiliated in his own house, mocked by the suitors,
threatened and forced to watch his mother besieged. So when
(11:25):
Odysseus returns, he gives Telemachus something he has been denied
for years the power to act, but that power comes
through blood. The slaughter of the suitors may be justified
within the moral world of the Bronze Age. The suitors
have violated Xenia, plotted murder, and devoured his father's house,
(11:45):
but what happens after the battle is harder to look
away from. Once the suitors are dead, the violence continues.
The disloyal women are forced to clean the blood and
filth from the hall before they are taken out and
killed Odysseus or their death, but Telemachus chooses the method.
He refuses to give them what he calls a clean death.
(12:07):
He hangs them, and Blentius is mutilated, nose, ears, genitals,
hands and feet cut off. This is punishment and humiliation.
This is rage scored into bodies, and that reaches beyond justice.
Odysseus restores his home through blood, Rather than being initiated
into manhood through peace, counsel or inheritance, Telemachus becomes a
(12:31):
man through slaughter and punishment. His rage is understandable. He
has lived for years under the shadow of men who
wanted his house, his mother, his inheritance, and eventually his life.
But understandable doesn't mean untouched. By darkness. When Odysseus brings
his son into the work of reclaiming Ithaca, he also
(12:53):
brings him into the strategy and logic of war. Odysseus's
homecoming requires the very violence that he has been trying
for years to survive. He has learned from Achilles that
glory was not enough. He's learned from Agamemnon that home
can betray you. He has learned from Calypso what it
means to lose agency and disappear from your own life.
(13:15):
And yet when he reaches Ithaca, he can't lay the
warrior down. Ithaca demands the warrior. His house can only
be reclaimed by the man that Troy carved through violence
into being a killer. That is the tragedy. Odysseus comes
home changed by war, but home is changed too. Peace
(13:38):
is waiting for him, but only on the other side
of yet another blood soaked battlefield. Maybe that is why
the Odyssey still matters so much as a story of
war and return. Homer doesn't give us a veteran who
simply walks back into his old life. Odysseus comes home
(13:58):
carrying war in his body and his instincts, and his suspicions,
in his need for disguise, in his capacity for violence,
and in the way that he teaches his son what
restored authority looks like. The suitors are dead, the house
is his, but the cost of war has entered the home,
(14:19):
and that prompts the deeper, uncomfortable question. Can the warrior
who returns home ever be the man he was before
after the slaughter? The bed test is significant because it's
the first real possibility of healing. Penelope doesn't accept Odysseus
because he's killed off all of the offending suitors, but
(14:42):
the violence he used to take his home back cannot
restore the marriage, so she tests him with the one
thing only her husband would know. The bed rooted in
the living olive tree posts, and Odysseus's anger that it
has been cut free and that it could be moved
tells us how much that bed means, because it's not
(15:04):
just a piece of furniture. It's the symbol of the
life that he thought he was coming home to marriage, fatherhood, kingship,
and the man that he was before Troy. If the
bed had been moved, then home itself had been severed
from its roots, and he would be utterly lost. This
is where doctor Sefu's idea of communal healing matters, or
(15:26):
doesn't just wound the soldier, It radiates outward into the
spouse and the child, the household, and the community. Odysseus's
suffering has shaped penelopes twenty years of endurance and Telemachus's
fatherless coming of age. Penelope hasn't merely waited. She has
held Ithaca together. She needs to know whether the man
(15:50):
before her is still connected to the shared life that
they built before he left, and whether or not just
the warrior has come home. And that is why the
bed is such a powerful symbol of hope. Odysseus doesn't
prove himself here through violence, but rather through memory. As
he reaches for hope, he remembers the olive tree post,
(16:14):
the secret of their bed, the thing that he made
with his own hands before war took him away, the
thing he crafted for a life when only brightness filled
his mind. For a moment, the warrior gives way to
the husband. The man who spent years surviving through his
cunning through bloodshed, is recognized through something domestic and soft,
(16:38):
something alive. What Penelope offers Odysseus is the first safe
place he's known in twenty years. If anyone could hold
him trace the scars with a gentle, steady hand, it
would be her. Only she would know which scars were
his before and after the war, and all his scars
(17:01):
would be their scars. As doctor Sifu said, quote, the
warrior's healing is their healing. His growth is their growth,
and at the same time, their growth is his growth
end quote. In this way, the symbol of the bed
is everything. It offers the first fragile sign that healing
(17:23):
might be possible, not just for Odysseus alone, but for
Penelope and Telemachus and the wounded house of Ithaca and
his kingdom. But Odysseus's story is not finished. He has
been translated as the man of twists and turns and
as a complicated man, and he does grow restless, and
(17:43):
that is the topic of the third episode in the
Odysseus series. As always, I thank you for listening and
supporting Greek mythology Retold podcasts. Please give a like or
rating on your podcast platform, and feel free to reach
out on social media with any comments or questions that
you might have. I love to hear from you. That's
(18:04):
it for now, so drink your wine and be merry.
Murmad's
Welcome back, murmered Ons to another episode of Greek Mythology
Retold Podcasts. I hope this episode finds you and yours
having a most excellent day. If this is your first
time joining us, welcome to our world where we love
Greek myths and all Trojan War related stories. I am
Janelle Ryhannon, the writer and host of this podcast and
(00:44):
author of the Homeric Chronicles and Epic Fantasy centered on
the Trojan War and the Odyssan and post Odissian era.
This is part two of the second episode in the
Odysseus series, where we will explore a king who is
struggling to return to that one place he has longed
to be for years. Home. The next leg of Odysseus's
(01:08):
journey takes him to the underworld, where he has a
breakthrough moment because it is the first place that he
can't fight, raid, seduce, deceive, command, or muscle his way
through the problem. He has to stand before the dead
and listen. The underworld experience takes on a new perspective
if we are reading him as a veteran struggling with
(01:31):
war and guilt, and his return in the underworld, Odysseus
is forced to look directly at the cost of everything
that he has survived. His mother, Antiklia, shows him that
his absence has wounded the home he is trying to reach.
She died grieving for him, and when he tries to
embrace her, she slips through his arms like a ghost.
(01:54):
This is what he has to look forward to, seeing
what his absence has done and knowing that he can't
undo it. Then Agamemnon gives him the nightmare version of homecoming.
Agamemnon survived Troy, crossed the sea, reached his home, only
to be murdered by Kladeymnestra and Asus. So the underworld
(02:15):
message isn't telling Odysseus go home. It plants the idea
that home itself might be dangerous. The man who survives
war may not be welcomed by the world that he
left behind. And then Achilles breaks the heroic code completely.
Odysseus tries to comfort him by saying he rules among
(02:36):
the dead, but Achilles rejects that consolation. He says that
he would rather be a poor farm hand alive than
lord over all these shadowy dead. This is Achilles, the
greatest warrior of the age, the man who chose glory
over long life, saying from beyond the grave that glory
(02:57):
was not enough. That had to shake go Odysseus up.
Everything these men were taught about war around the campfires
and hearts as they were growing up. Honor, fame, spoils
song is called into question by the dead themselves. Achilles
doesn't even ask about his own glory. He asks about
(03:18):
his son Neoptolemus. He longs for his father, Pelias. Achilles
says that he is of no use to those he
loves because he can't help them now that he is dead.
So the underworld forces Odysseus to confront the truth that
war doesn't end when the fighting stops. It follows men
into their homes, into their families, into their memories, and
(03:42):
even into the afterlife. By the time Odysseus leaves the underworld,
he has not simply received prophecy. He has been forced
to look death, regret, failed homecoming, and broken glory in
the face. By the time Odysseus reaches calyps he is
no longer a man just delayed on his way home.
(04:04):
He is the sole survivor. Every ship is gone, every
man who followed him from Troy is dead. This is
where the survivor guilt becomes impossible to ignore. He would
have years to replay every decision, the Scones, the cyclops Aolis,
bag of winds, the Lystragonians, Circe, the cattle of Helios.
(04:27):
He would be thinking, where did I fail? What should
I have done differently? Could I have saved them? That
kind of mental return to the moment of loss is
part of the burden Doctor David Seafood describes when he
asks us to imagine quote the guilt, sense of failed
responsibility and helplessness end quote of being unable to prevent
(04:51):
injury or death. Odysseus is not only grieving his men.
He is carrying the unbearable fact that he lived and
they did not. That is why Calypso is not merely
another circe. Circe was the danger of comfort becoming forgetfulness.
Calypso is the danger of captivity becoming despair. By the
(05:12):
time Odysseus reaches Ogigia, he has lost every external marker
of the man that he once was. He has no ships,
he has no army, no command, no spoils, no comrades,
and no battlefield. Identity. He is not home, so he
can't fully be a king or husband or father. But
(05:33):
he's no longer at war either, so he can't be
the commander, the raider, the strategist, the hero who mattered
at Troy. He exists in between identities, trapped on an
island with a goddess who desires him but can't restore
him to himself, and the reversal is brutal. For Odysseus.
(05:54):
In the Iliad, he is the man in control. He
is the one who goes on the night raids. He
takes prisoners, interrogates enemies, kills sleeping men, and returns to
camp with blood on his hands and honor attached to
his name. But on Calypso's island, he is now the captive.
He is the one without agency. He is the one
(06:17):
whose body is wanted while his will is ignored. He
has lost command, not only of his men because they're dead,
but also he's lost command of himself. This is why
the Odysseus we see with Calypso is immobilized by despair.
The Odysseus of Troy might have thrown himself into the
(06:38):
sea and dared the gods to stop him. But this
Odysseus has been worn down by twenty years of war
and wandering and grief, and he has suffered substantial loss.
He is no longer a man of action and honor.
So if the Cyclops episode shows Odysseus reaching back toward
the identity that war gave him, Circe shows him numbing
(07:01):
himself through comfort and suspended time, Calypso shows what happens
when that identity collapses. He is hidden from the world,
erased from his own story, and reduced to longing. He
needs release, and he can't achieve that release alone. The
(07:21):
gods have to intervene because Odysseus for once can't find
the strength to cunning his way off of the island.
By the time Odysseus returns to Ithaca, he is not
the same man who sailed to Troy twenty years earlier.
He has been through ten years of war, raids, ambushes, slaughter, command, loss,
(07:42):
and ten more years of wandering, temptations, grief, captivity, and
now finally survival. He has been the man who led
night raids with Diamedes, the man who sacked Troy, the
man who blended the Cyclops, and who lost ship after
ship and crew after crew until he remained by Calypso's island.
He has lost almost every external marker of power that
(08:06):
he once had. He has no army, no ships, no spoils,
and no comrades and no command. He is sole survivor.
He is alive, but he is stripped down to just
his memory, and before he ever reaches Ithaca, the underworld
has already poisoned the idea of homecoming. Agamemnon tells of
the nightmare version of Nostos. A man can survive Troy,
(08:30):
cross the sea, and reach his house and still be
murdered at his hearth. He tells Odysseus that no woman
is safe. Agamemnon's warning is bitter, even misogynistic, because he
has been betrayed, but his words find purchase. This teaches
Odysseus that homecoming can't be trusted. He can't simply walk
(08:51):
through the doors as a husband and a father and
king with his arms wide open. He has to test
the house, He has to watch, He has to hide himself.
So when Odysseus returns in disguise, that is not just
a strategy. It is the behavior of a man who
has learned that home might be dangerous, and instead of peace,
(09:11):
that he might find betrayal. That is what makes the
Ithaca section of his story so tragic. Odysseus has spent
the entire poem trying to get home, but when he
finally arrives, home doesn't offer peace. His house has become
occupied territory. The suitors have consumed his wealth and dishonored
his household, pressured his wife, threatened his son, and plotted
(09:35):
his son's murder. Odysseus can't return as Penelope's husband or
Telemachus's father just walk in and resume his roles. He
has to return as an infiltrator, the strategist, the killer,
the very skills that war has carved into him. These
are the skills that Ithaca now demands. He comes home
(09:55):
for peace, but his enemies have brought him war. Yeah,
I smuck and little Red rising. You know, you know
that is the brutal irony of Odysseus's homecoming. If he
had returned with twelve ships and hundreds of hardened veterans,
the suitors likely would have scattered because they aren't warriors.
They were too young to go to Troy. They were
the boys that war and their fathers left behind. But
(10:17):
Odysseus returns alone. All the power he should have brought
from Troy is gone. No army stands behind him, no
comrades surround him, no spoils announce his victory. He has
only his body, his mind, his son, a few loyal servants,
and the old war honed cunning that kept him alive.
So in order to reclaim the domestic world, he has
(10:41):
to reactivate the warrior's self. The man who has been
broken by war must become useful through war once again.
And this is where Telemachus becomes so important. Their union
is deeply moving, because Odysseus doesn't only regain a son,
Telemachus regains the father he new. Odysseus also brings Telemachus
(11:03):
into violence. Telemachus is no longer a child. He is
around twenty, bearded, publicly recognized, already trying to step into
adult male status, but he is untested in war. He
has been humiliated in his own house, mocked by the suitors,
threatened and forced to watch his mother besieged. So when
(11:25):
Odysseus returns, he gives Telemachus something he has been denied
for years the power to act, but that power comes
through blood. The slaughter of the suitors may be justified
within the moral world of the Bronze Age. The suitors
have violated Xenia, plotted murder, and devoured his father's house,
(11:45):
but what happens after the battle is harder to look
away from. Once the suitors are dead, the violence continues.
The disloyal women are forced to clean the blood and
filth from the hall before they are taken out and
killed Odysseus or their death, but Telemachus chooses the method.
He refuses to give them what he calls a clean death.
(12:07):
He hangs them, and Blentius is mutilated, nose, ears, genitals,
hands and feet cut off. This is punishment and humiliation.
This is rage scored into bodies, and that reaches beyond justice.
Odysseus restores his home through blood, Rather than being initiated
into manhood through peace, counsel or inheritance, Telemachus becomes a
(12:31):
man through slaughter and punishment. His rage is understandable. He
has lived for years under the shadow of men who
wanted his house, his mother, his inheritance, and eventually his life.
But understandable doesn't mean untouched. By darkness. When Odysseus brings
his son into the work of reclaiming Ithaca, he also
(12:53):
brings him into the strategy and logic of war. Odysseus's
homecoming requires the very violence that he has been trying
for years to survive. He has learned from Achilles that
glory was not enough. He's learned from Agamemnon that home
can betray you. He has learned from Calypso what it
means to lose agency and disappear from your own life.
(13:15):
And yet when he reaches Ithaca, he can't lay the
warrior down. Ithaca demands the warrior. His house can only
be reclaimed by the man that Troy carved through violence
into being a killer. That is the tragedy. Odysseus comes
home changed by war, but home is changed too. Peace
(13:38):
is waiting for him, but only on the other side
of yet another blood soaked battlefield. Maybe that is why
the Odyssey still matters so much as a story of
war and return. Homer doesn't give us a veteran who
simply walks back into his old life. Odysseus comes home
(13:58):
carrying war in his body and his instincts, and his suspicions,
in his need for disguise, in his capacity for violence,
and in the way that he teaches his son what
restored authority looks like. The suitors are dead, the house
is his, but the cost of war has entered the home,
(14:19):
and that prompts the deeper, uncomfortable question. Can the warrior
who returns home ever be the man he was before
after the slaughter? The bed test is significant because it's
the first real possibility of healing. Penelope doesn't accept Odysseus
because he's killed off all of the offending suitors, but
(14:42):
the violence he used to take his home back cannot
restore the marriage, so she tests him with the one
thing only her husband would know. The bed rooted in
the living olive tree posts, and Odysseus's anger that it
has been cut free and that it could be moved
tells us how much that bed means, because it's not
(15:04):
just a piece of furniture. It's the symbol of the
life that he thought he was coming home to marriage, fatherhood, kingship,
and the man that he was before Troy. If the
bed had been moved, then home itself had been severed
from its roots, and he would be utterly lost. This
is where doctor Sefu's idea of communal healing matters, or
(15:26):
doesn't just wound the soldier, It radiates outward into the
spouse and the child, the household, and the community. Odysseus's
suffering has shaped penelopes twenty years of endurance and Telemachus's
fatherless coming of age. Penelope hasn't merely waited. She has
held Ithaca together. She needs to know whether the man
(15:50):
before her is still connected to the shared life that
they built before he left, and whether or not just
the warrior has come home. And that is why the
bed is such a powerful symbol of hope. Odysseus doesn't
prove himself here through violence, but rather through memory. As
he reaches for hope, he remembers the olive tree post,
(16:14):
the secret of their bed, the thing that he made
with his own hands before war took him away, the
thing he crafted for a life when only brightness filled
his mind. For a moment, the warrior gives way to
the husband. The man who spent years surviving through his
cunning through bloodshed, is recognized through something domestic and soft,
(16:38):
something alive. What Penelope offers Odysseus is the first safe
place he's known in twenty years. If anyone could hold
him trace the scars with a gentle, steady hand, it
would be her. Only she would know which scars were
his before and after the war, and all his scars
(17:01):
would be their scars. As doctor Sifu said, quote, the
warrior's healing is their healing. His growth is their growth,
and at the same time, their growth is his growth
end quote. In this way, the symbol of the bed
is everything. It offers the first fragile sign that healing
(17:23):
might be possible, not just for Odysseus alone, but for
Penelope and Telemachus and the wounded house of Ithaca and
his kingdom. But Odysseus's story is not finished. He has
been translated as the man of twists and turns and
as a complicated man, and he does grow restless, and
(17:43):
that is the topic of the third episode in the
Odysseus series. As always, I thank you for listening and
supporting Greek mythology Retold podcasts. Please give a like or
rating on your podcast platform, and feel free to reach
out on social media with any comments or questions that
you might have. I love to hear from you. That's
(18:04):
it for now, so drink your wine and be merry.
Murmad's
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